Soon, a dual screen smartwatch

Pranav Mistry, head of the think tank team, Samsung Research America presents the Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch during its launch at the 'Samsung UNPACKED 2013 Episode 2' at the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin, September 4, 2013. The IFA consumer electronics and home appliances fair will open its doors to the public from September 6 till 11 in the German capital. REUTERS/Fabrizio Bensch (GERMANY - Tags: BUSINESS TELECOMS SCIENCE TECHNOLOGY) - RTX137AJ

Washington: What if your smartwatch had two screens? Dealing with the tiny device and the command-inputting process would become less difficult. A team of researchers has brought this dual screen concept closer to reality.

A Dartmouth researcher and his collaborators have unveiled a prototype of a smartwatch with dual touchscreens called Doppio. It is a reconfigurable smartwatch with two touch-sensitive display faces, one of which detaches from the wrist-bound screen and can be stuck above or to the side.

“The orientation of the top relative to the base and how the top is attached to the base create a very large interaction space,” says researcher Xing-Dong Yang.

In their presentation, the researchers discussed possible configurations, transitions and manipulations in this space. Using a passive prototype, they conducted an exploratory study to probe how people might use this style of smartwatch interaction. And with an instrumented prototype, they conducted a controlled experiment to evaluate the transition times between configurations and subjective preferences.

They used the combined results of these two studies to generate a set of characteristics and design considerations for applying this interaction space to smartwatch applications.